Although this live chat solution is one of the newer providers in our reviews, it definitely makes an interesting first impression. Userlike comes from Germany, and, being a European company it naturally supports all the EU privacy laws (GDPR etc.).
A recent addition to their product is the chatbot. It basically manages your chat requests until a human agent is available. Apart from that, they also pride themselves in their team features and CRM integrations (for example there is seamless integration with Salesforce). They offer a 14-day free trial to get to know their service.
Read on to see if it's worth your time:
Free
Unlimited chats, includes 1 agent
Team
Includes 3 agents, 3 chat widgets and allows access to integration
Corporate
Includes 5 agents, 5 chat widgets and full customization
Business
Includes 10 agents, 10 chat widgets and skill-based routing
Prices for annual billing.
| criterion | rating | comments |
|---|---|---|
Ease of use | The interface is well structured and for the most part also easy to understand. A few settings are a bit more complicated than they need to be. | |
Setup | Copy and paste the code into your site or use one of their plugins. It always takes a few moments until chat widget changes become active, which can be a bit frustrating at times. | |
Themes and Style Options | You can change the color and choose between a few chat button styles as well as attention-grabbing “Eyecatchers”. These don’t work with all chat buttons, though. | |
Chat features | ||
Chat client | Looks good and can be moved around freely on the screen. Shows a photo of the agent. Users can rate their chat experience after the chat is over. | |
Chat agent console | They offer a web console, which they recommend, as well as the use of IMs like Pidgin. | |
Automatic messaging | Proactive chats that pop up automatically can be set up as well as goals for specific actions (e.g. user bought something after chatting to an agent). Behavior-based triggers can only be implemented by altering the code. Using their new chatbot (aka Chat Butler), you can keep people entertained while they are waiting for a human agent. | |
Offline mode | Offer either a feedback form or hide it when your team is offline. You can also use the chatbot to serve your visitors when no one is there. Unfortunately, what you can do with it is quite limited. | |
Shortcuts / canned messages | Canned messages can be set up easily (chat macros) as well as push macros (specific URLs that you can push your visitors to). | |
Tracking & live analytics | | Once you are engaged in a chat (not before), it will show detailed user information like the country, city and the visitor’s current page. It should at least should show the number of current visitors on your site so you have an idea of what’s going on. |
Internationalization | You can use Userlike in 7 languages. The backend is available in English, German, Spanish and Dutch. It’s also possible to customize interface texts and/or to create chat widgets in different languages. | |
Ticketing system | | No own solution. |
Integrations and add-ons | | Zendesk, Highrise, Salesforce and many more. |
Advanced Features | ||
Team Management | | You can transfer chats within your team; groups can be defined. |
Mobile support / apps | | Works very well for website visitors on mobile devices – it adapts very well to small screen sizes. You can even change the chat behavior for mobile visitors – e.g. deactivate the greeting message. |
Cobrowsing | | |
Ban users | | Type /block to ban a user. The chat client will not appear anymore for this user. |
Log creation | | All chat conversations are stored. |
Support |
| Their personal support worked really well in our tests. They also have plenty of tutorials available. |
Overall rating | 3.5/5 | We really like the ability to set conversion goals for your agents. If Userlike had triggered messages it would be an even more useful tool. |
All in all, Userlike is a solid solution although we felt the user-experience, as well as the range of features, could still be better. There were a few settings in the setup of the chat widget that we didn’t find that intuitive. On the bright side, you are able to easily request screenshots from your visitors, which can solve a lot of issues very quickly.
Depending on the features you need, Userlike can be a good choice. We see particular strengths in their multilingual availability, survey and chat rating options as well as their CRM integrations. Getting live support in a European time zone and the possibility to switch off the collection of private user data can be a distinctive advantage for companies located in Europe.
It will be interesting in what ways they will develop their chatbot. So far it’s too limited to really be of much help but it’s a great first step.
They offer three different pricing tiers, which all feature a 14-day free trial.
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